Love letters from your writing

It just makes sense: we’d rather spend time with those people who love and support us than those that nag and belittle us.

But we often don’t think of our relationship with our writing in that way. So often when we have a writing project in progress, or even just in mind, we are hard on ourselves if we aren’t committing the time that it needs to get done. We feel guilty. We kick ourselves.

In essence, we are creating a relationship in which our poems/essays/stories/plays are nagging and whining for us to pay attention to them. And who wants to hang out with something like that?

Wouldn’t you be more likely to respond to an entreaty or seduction? My workshop participants who needed a little motivation signed up for a mid-week “kick in the ass” email. This is what they got instead: